Midwives Among the Dead: How Missionaries Persevere in Hard Places

Soon after six humid summers in Burma (now Myanmar), wherever temperatures topped 100 degrees, Adoniram Judson (1788–1850) hadn’t found a one transform. Malaria, dysentery, and other illnesses threatened the weary American and at some point took the life of a number of associates of his beloved household. Excruciating trials on leading of horrible disappointments punctuated his 38 years of gospel labor.

What kept Judson likely as he ran into difficult situation and tough hearts? Judson explained to his pricey close friend Luther Rice, “An almighty and trustworthy God will accomplish his claims.” Judson rooted his hope in God’s ability and motivation to preserve sinners.

While the world-wide landscape has adjusted dramatically given that Judson’s working day, the human coronary heart has not. Today’s mission discipline calls for males and ladies who, like Judson, stake every thing on the reality that God alone can and will accomplish his preserving promises.

Missionaries as Midwives

Only God can enliven dead hearts. The biblical doctrine of regeneration teaches that, in link with listening to the gospel proclaimed (Romans 10:14), the Holy Spirit provides a sinner’s spiritually dead soul to lifestyle (Ephesians 2:1, 8–9). His quickening by itself allows a sinner to repent and believe. In other phrases, regeneration by the Holy Spirit sales opportunities to conserving faith. The Holy Spirit’s function does not simply make faith feasible it will make faith certain. No just one whom the Holy Spirit regenerates fails to come to religion in Christ (Romans 8:30), and no one comes to religion in Christ aside from the Spirit initial remaking his rebel coronary heart.

Greedy this doctrine provides a missionary the privilege of proclaiming the gospel that provides new start. It also relieves him of the burden of believing it is up to him to develop conversions. A faithful missionary is like a midwife who supports the mother as she ushers her baby into the earth. Even though the missionary’s task is not to resurrect the dead, he does engage in a God-ordained role in a sinner’s rebirth. God graciously uses indicates to accomplish his salvation program as a result, missionaries aid the helpless on their path to new and everlasting life by declaring the gospel.

On the mission discipline, realizing this variation involving what a missionary does and doesn’t complete amid the misplaced is necessary — and the implications could be eternal.

Guarding the Gospel

Just as a missionary headed to a overseas land vaccinates towards possible conditions, adopting a midwife mentality inoculates the missionary from both equally distorting the gospel message and deploying risky signifies toward noble ends. Missionaries very long to see unreached persons change “from idols to serve the living and correct God, and to hold out for his Son from heaven” (1 Thessalonians 1:9–10), but excellent intentions can go awry if still left unguarded by audio doctrine.

It was the apostle Paul’s conviction that God by itself can glow gospel light-weight into darkish hearts that kept him from surrendering to discouragement, tampering with God’s term, or accomplishing ministry in “underhanded ways” (2 Corinthians 4:1–6). For the reason that Paul recognized that only God authors daily life, he committed himself to declaring the truth openly — no issue the price tag (2 Corinthians 4:2). Paul didn’t distort the gospel message or use strategies that dilute its fact because he was confident in God’s potential to revive dead hearts by way of his individual word.

Today’s missionaries facial area threats of equally gospel dilution and gospel distortion mainly because an anemic doctrine of regeneration threatens gospel clarity. Some missionaries insist on immediate, contrived strategies for converting persons and for measuring that progress. Many others baptize “converts” from Muslim backgrounds who do not confess or realize Jesus to be the Son of God. Syncretism basically refuses to depend on the electric power of God for conversion. Somewhat than settle for their function as midwives who have a front-row seat to God’s resurrection electric power, as well quite a few missionaries test to choose more than his placement.

“The get the job done of changing souls is God’s from starting to conclude.”

A biblical see of regeneration also defends missionaries in opposition to satisfaction. It frees us to labor in the humility that Jonah observed only in the tummy of the great fish, wherever he ultimately acknowledged that “salvation belongs to the Lord” (Jonah 2:9) — not to us. Though our enemy would have us believe normally, we are God’s servants by grace, not by requirement. Midwives may possibly be handy, but they are not main. Missionaries may possibly stroll along with the person God will save, but missionaries really don’t deliver anyone’s salvation. The work of converting souls is God’s from beginning to end.
Embracing this fact destroys pleasure.

Empowering Faithfulness

A biblical viewpoint on regeneration does far more than secure. It empowers missionaries to walk in faithfulness for the prolonged haul. The midwife doesn’t operate when the labor gets to be tricky. When the birth pains intensify, her presence is most strategic and necessary.

Rightly understanding regeneration equips missionaries with the self-control to be prayerfully individual — to persevere when persecution, or monotony, intensifies. What held the fantastic missionaries of history — like Amy Carmichael, David Livingstone, and William Carey — laboring in the toughest fields with patience? They knew that a single human being vegetation and one more waters, but God presents the advancement (1 Corinthians 3:6). His growing electric power encourages missionaries to perform their part over months and a long time, trusting God will provide the advance in his time. Missionaries are not in charge of when God provides on his promises any extra than a midwife decides when a little one will be born. Both equilibrium expectation and patience as they wait around.

Pragmatism is a fantastic temptation on the area. A missionary’s dreams of converting the unreached can promptly melt into disappointments. God generally would make his choice laborers much more aware of setbacks than successes. In those occasions, missionaries have to lean on what was correct for Paul and Judson, for the reason that it is even now true for us. Irrespective of his suffering, Paul realized that no disappointment, discouragement, or dim coronary heart has at any time prevented God’s power to glow forth “the light-weight of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:6). The supernatural fact that God authors everyday living in deserts of demise redirects our concentrate from the seen to the unseen.

Raising Anticipations

In God’s kindness, a missionary’s hope is not denied it is just in some cases deferred. What we simply cannot see now will become very clear in eternity. God’s sovereign get the job done implies that he by itself decides the depth and breadth of a missionary’s ministry. Who is aware if God has called you to till pretty tough soil right now so that he may produce enduring, unimaginable fruit after a lot of tomorrows? The biblical check out of regeneration showers the missionary with the self esteem to labor expectantly, being aware of we serve a God who will vindicate himself and his servants by melting hearts of stone. We will see that vindication entirely in the subsequent life.

“Our accountability is basically to proclaim the lifetime that God by yourself can give.”

If the New Testomony demonstrates us that the regular Christian lifestyle is costly, how significantly much more highly-priced could possibly the mission discipline show? And still, the exact same New Testament reveals that missionaries can persevere for the long haul — even when we sacrifice the comforts of our residences only to fulfill disappointments and dead hearts. For missionaries, God’s power to give life implies that irrespective of whether Jonah is caught in the belly of a fish or Paul is clinging to a plank in the sea (Acts 27:43–44), no circumstance or human heart lies outside of his sovereign directing.

If you feel alone on the mission subject, or if the difficult soil looks to mock your efforts, lean into your purpose as a spiritual midwife: as a missionary who arrives together with the function God is executing, realizing that he has been executing that perform because very long before you arrived on the scene. We can not manufacture conversions, and we shouldn’t try — because the consequence is not on our shoulders. Our duty is merely to proclaim the lifestyle that God on your own can give.